


SUNKIST (ON THE SECOND DAY OF SUMMER)

by carcassofbeef



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Can be read as kagehina or oihina but tbh it’s just orange, bokuaka are married that’s just the way it is, if u squint there’s one actual romantic hoshihina hint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25446709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carcassofbeef/pseuds/carcassofbeef
Summary: Hinata Shoyou eats an orange over the course of nine years.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio, Hinata Shouyou/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 17
Kudos: 82





	SUNKIST (ON THE SECOND DAY OF SUMMER)

He peels open the orange, as one does; breaks the rind at the sepal, presses down until he feels the give of the fruit through the thick waxy cuticle, uneven pressure on the inner side of Shoyou’s nail. He digs his thumb in, along the inner curve, feels it cling to his skin like lichen, sweet and sticky. The peel is rigid, rough beneath the pads of his fingertips, bumpy and uneven; brightly orange, sunburst on palm leaves. He can smell the bitterness of the peel; beneath it, a softer blossom scent; and beneath that, the kick of acid he can taste with his skin, sour like the ocean on a hot day. The orange undoes itself under his hands, a thick layer of peel, an itch that seeps into the pockets of Shoyou’s skin, buried in the folds between his fingers, the sweetness in the beds of his nails. He follows the invisible latitudes of the orange, the bursting tenderness of the fruit against the knuckle of his thumb. The orange— and therefore the universe— opens itself up like a flower before him, the stringy white insides now pithy and soft, an oily residue on his skin. There’s juice on his fingers, watery and viscous all at once, the sticky sweetness of organic matter. He rubs it between his fingers until it dries and therefore disappears, a fragrant spot on the inside of his pinkie and beneath his thumb. The smell of the orange is stronger now, rid of its shell, the sweetness muted through the layer of hardened pith clinging to the fruit, now somewhere between off white and yellow. It’s  sweet, in the same watery-vague way tea is bitter, the caress of a hot wind when blinded by the sun; tempered by its own acidity, a sourness that hits only at the back of Shoyou’s throat. He feels the water weight on the now naked orange, covered unevenly in zest— exposing some of its bare fruit like the cracks in concrete, sits in his palm with the same aspherical surety of a volleyball.

“Here,” he says to Tobio, sitting beside him. “You have some too.”

🍊

The thought occurs to Shoyou, half-formed and blurry, as he’s brushing his teeth— the thought occurs to him that oranges in Brazil taste different from those in Japan. He spits out a mouthful of toothpaste, and says to the mirror— fogged over, lit in orange and gold by virtue of his hair and the open window, “Fuck.”

He says this to Oikawa, over breakfast. “Do the oranges taste different here?” 

Tooru pours milk into his black coffee. The color changes, a whirlpool gradient, the pits of the universe. “Do they? I don’t think so.” 

“I think they do,” Shoyou says again, frowns. He clasps his hands, and they mutter  _ itadakimasu  _ in unison over two cups of black coffee. 

“Mm,” Tooru says; “Must be a different kind of orange.”

“Must be,” Shoyou repeats, and puts it out of his mind. 

The thought comes to him again, persistent, drags after him like a bird with broken bones. They’re at the supermarket this time, the sweet heat of the Brazilian sun seeping through the concrete, drapes over Shoyou, like an old, over-enthusiastic friend. He brings the orange to his nose and sniffs— a long drag like he’s passing a bakery; and he’s right. It’s different, sweeter, headier, like everything else in Brazil, leaves Shoyou swimming.

“Dude,” Tooru says beside him, sweaty and resplendent. “What the fuck.”

Shoyou shakes his head, sets the orange into his basket— he feels bad not buying it after shoving his face in it. “I was right— it’s different.”

“What— what are you talking about?”

“This morning,” Shoyou says, “Brazilian oranges smell different from the ones at home— they probably taste different too.” 

Tooru looks at him for a moment, then he smiles. “I’m in the mood for an orange anyway. Get some more.”

It occurs to Shoyou again; in the relative cool of the Brazilian night, that Brazil tastes like a broken fever. 

Shoyou has a working theory— more than the back of his mind, but less than a conscious thought; somewhere in the soft middle of his brain— that the entirety of the world can be explained by way of analogy, that everything can be encapsulated by everything else. After all, it seems unfair that one thing should be allowed to be only one of that thing. 

He inherits this habit from his mom— he counts these out on his fingers; the hair, the eyes, his hands and the line of his nose, the thought that the world was more than it really was. He remembers crouching by anthills— making mountains out of mole hills, he had said, before he figured out the meaning of the idiom; remembers sitting by the sea and thinking that the crash of the waves was the same as that of broken bone. A particularly difficult maths test is a bike ride up a mountain. A delicious meal is the feeling of stepping out of your shoes at home. The universe is an orange.

He carries this habit over to volleyball, as he had every other part of himself. This has two effects: one, that Shoyou thinks of everything in terms of volleyball— a delicious meal is the feeling of a good bump, mathematics is the touch of your knee on the linoleum; two, that Shoyou starts defining volleyball in unequivocal terms— the net is the upper line of a bird’s wing, the end-line is the smell of autumn leaves; and everything in between— volleyball, in its entirety— an orange too. 

And now, apparently, Brazil is the breaking of a fever, the crest of an incoming tide. 

He says this out loud— not to Tooru, sitting beside him on the beach— but to the universe, or perhaps just to speak it into being. His words hang in the air between them, in the atmosphere that tastes like the tail end of a good curry, as is the entirety of their purpose. It just so happens that Tooru is there, and it just so happens that Tooru can hear whatever comes out of Shoyou’s mouth. 

“Man,” Tooru says, passes him the perfect half of an orange, suspended between them for a moment. “That’s fucking deep.” 

“Not really,” Shoyou says. The sand sticks to his feet, clumps like cement; Tooru had taken care to remove all the white pith from the orange, leaves it perfectly smooth and plump— a slice fit for display, canned oranges in jelly. Shoyou pops it into his mouth. “Sweet.”

“Mm,” Tooru says, stuffs one cheek with orange. “You were right though.”

“Hmm?” 

“About the orange. It  _is_ sweeter here.” There’s a pause. Then Tooru says again, in a tone as forward and forthright as their coffee had been that morning. “I’m not going back to Japan, Shoyou-kun.” 

Shoyou squints at him— the reflection of Tooru, at least, his figure on the far horizon in the eye of Shoyou’s mind. “Oh.” 

“Mmhmm,” Tooru says, non-committal; milk diluting coffee, the softening of his tone. “But you already knew that.” 

Shoyou says nothing. The slice of orange in Tooru’s hand turns, over and over, blunt fingers picking at it unexpectedly gently. He handles it with the same everyday casualness he affords a volleyball, the dexterity of a setter’s hands. Shoyou watches as Tooru pulls at the hard white inner spine of the slice, like the unravelling of a sweater, discards of the pith in a neat little pile; cleans it of its imperfections, endlessly meticulous. Then Tooru says,

“Will you stay here, Shoyou?” 

The wave of longing hits then; the subtle, bland sweetness of Japanese oranges, 100 yen for one, 400 yen for five— the clementine-like taste rather the swimming saccharinity. Shoyou shifts, shakes the sand from his feet. He picks up one of the oranges, feels its weight; digs in a finger and starts to peel it. “No.”

“Will you come back then, Shoyou? To Brazil.”

He splits the orange into two perfect halves, rid of the peel, cleaves a line down the middle of the universe— the far horizon, where the sky devolves into the sea. “Yes. I’ll stay then, probably.”

He passes half of the orange to Oikawa Tooru, who just so happens to be sitting beside him, an imprint in the sand, made of the same velvet as the leaves of a Lamb’s Ear; hands him half the universe, meticulously picked clean of pith. “But you already knew that.”

🍊

And therefore even the undone orange breaks itself down further, down and down until it’s nothing but atoms, and then even further until it once again becomes the universe, the galaxy, seeping through Shoyou’s fingers. He splits it in half with his palms— the sound of the opening orange a sizzling, a burning, the aftermath of the first crack of lightning— then again, and again, mitosis and meiosis, again, rips apart the orange along where it is ribbed; the spine of the universe. The zest clings to each other, unwillingly to part, like the clearing of moss, shreds in his hands. Shoyou removes the stem at the centre of the orange— like the axle of a wheel— finds stray, undeveloped orange pips buried beside it; pops them in his mouth. He lays them out, slices of orange like uneven crescents of the moon— in its first quarter? Second quarter? He can’t remember— framed in bitter white, a pattern of veins like the monarch butterfly, a gradient of white till brilliant orange. The exposed flesh, where the membrane had broken, where Shoyou had put force, through finger and thumb, pulled away at the slice, accordion bends— glistens at him, little pockets of the full and the unburst, barely contained surface tension. 

He extends it to Tobio, six perfectly uneven slices of orange. “There you go,” he says, when Tobio accepts them with his wide, calloused hands, “Half for me, half for you.” 

🍊

When Hoshiumi Korai comes to him, it’s an accident— the mistaken collusion of two galaxies, millennia in the making. 

In his lap sits an unopened protein bar; in his hand, an apple. He takes an enthusiastic bite; breaks the crisp flesh open with his teeth. “SHOYOU.” He yells, across the barrier of traffic; an approximation of heralding angels. “SHOYOU HINATA. YOU HAVE RETURNED.”

Shoyou sets down his bags on the sun-warmed concrete of Hanaeda Airport, waves at Korai on the opposite side of the highway; fishermen across a great river, the cowherder and the weaver. “Hoshiumi-san!” He yells at him. “I’m back!”

“I HAVE BEEN WAITING, SHOYOU.” Korai bellows. The protein bar trembles and commits suicide, jumping off Korai’s lap; the broken red spot of the apple waves like the signal light of a ship in the night. “ARE YOU STAYING, HINATA SHOYOU.”

“Yes!!” Shoyou says, a conversation amplified by several decibels. He belatedly wonders if this would be better suited over the phone— he doesn’t have Hoshiumi’s number, anyway; and his SIM card is still under a Brazilian server. “I’m going to the Black Jackals!!!” He puts emphasis in each capital letter, gestures with his hands. “M! S! B! Y! Black Jackals!!”

“GOOD.” Korai yells back. Apple sprays out of his mouth. “THEY ARE STRONG.” He takes another huge bite, then points at Shoyou; the sight of a laser across four lanes of a traffic. “I WILL DEFEAT YOU, SHOYOU HINATA.” 

Then, perhaps for effect, he sends the apple into a nearby trashcan with the finality of a spike. The trashcan jumps— a cohort of businessmen stop to glare at Hoshiumi, the tiny triumphant god of a meteorite apple; but this is Haneda Airport, where everyone has somewhere better to be; and they shuffle along. 

When Udai Tenma finds him, it is through cotton wool— the thick of the Brazilian jungle is nothing next to the breath and exhale of the Tokyo masses. 

Shoyou tries out for the Jackals, gets in. Bokuto welcomes him, re-introduces him to Akaashi, who brings him lunch every other practice; and then Udai Tenma, who tags along with Akaashi every other  _other_ lunch. Shoyou squints at him against the sun, towering presence, a god of muscle and flesh, ink and ether. Do they even make people like him anymore? One foot on the court, the other in the air. 

But the days turn and the sun sets, the needle of a sundial, and like the shadow of an obelisk— the god folds and bends and doubles into itself, the slipping of its black form down a stone pillar like the arching spine of a cat; until he sits before Shoyou, across the hot plate of a Korean barbecue, only the exponential of infinitesimals. His wings are folded, their golden edge tucked, his halo pointed inwards; his talons sharp as he turns over the pages of the menu, asks if Shoyou wants chicken or pork, or maybe to try the roasted pineapple? 

“Yes,” Shoyou says, a craving, suddenly sticky, at the back of his throat. “Pineapple is good.”  


His temple— the house of the sun, he remembers— throbs with heat, the oily exhaust hanging in the air. At the table next to them, Bokuto laughs, bright like the neon lights above their heads, the bubbling of alcohol; Akaashi murmurs something in return, the stirring of a straw in the iced sweetness of soda. 

“I don’t think I’ve properly congratulated you for making the Jackals.” Udai Tenma says, over the melting fat on the stove. The meat shrinks, tightens, then loosens again; one last struggle, the bare edge of the animal’s strength.“How do you feel, Shoyou-kun?”

“Linoleum taste different after a diet of nothing but sand.” Shoyou says, quietly, to his lap. The pineapple sits, pretty, a slice of the sun— sizzles as its moisture evaporates. 

And Udai Tenma grins at him, opens his mouth to reveal inner machinations, all the ways his being had been twisted to fit into his tiny mortal exterior, clicks his tongs together. “Try more pineapple— wash the taste from your mouth.” 

When they make to leave, Bokuto giddy with beer, Akaashi with an arm around his waist, Shoyou realizes, belatedly, that he stands taller than Udai Tenma. He’s floating on a high of yakiniku and pineapple; neither of his feet can touch the ground. 

When Tobio reaches for him, it is the last day of the year, and thus also the first day of the year. 

Shoyou has nothing on his mind— except everything that’s on his mind, the ricochet of the ball against the lines of his wrist—strain in his legs, counts his vertebrae as he bolts back upright, the sight of the ball in a high, beautiful arc like a twisting in his chest. “Chance ball!” He yells, and that’s the taste of a lemon at the back of his throat, acrid and sweet all at once, the scrape of its peel. A perfect receive, one last midnight game before his flight— that’s the taste of a mango, orange and yellow and green, sweet and overripe. 

Shoyou looks across the net, through the cubed haze of mango, _mango_ ; and that’s when he sees him, Tobio, in the line of the arm and the turn of the waist, the shadow of Tobio hiding inside the opposite server. He startles, the kick of ice down his back; then Tobio again, this time in the footing of a dive receive; then again, again in the angle of the wrists and the set of shoulders— until Shoyou is ready to leap across the court, sink into the sand, bite into green and yellow. 

Tobio, on the other side of the world— Shoyou looks up, up, raises his hands in hallelujah, in grace, in an emergency set. The Brazilian night sky is brilliant and cool— invisible latitudes and longitudes arching over the infinitely flat coast, shaking and fluttering like the greeting of a ghost beyond the water of a pool, leaves Shoyou swimming. 

Tobio, on the other side of the world— it would be around noon, wouldn’t it? What awaits him when Tobio looks up— _down_ , Shoyou reminds himself, for over there everything is the opposite of what it is here— _what is the opposite of the swimming-pool galaxy?_ Shoyou considers it, looks down where his hands are calloused and bruised, where the nails are cracked and blunt; where Tobio’s are long and pale and smooth, the at-odds diligence of setters— thinks, _it’s the heat of a mango, sweet and cooling, but searing in its wake._

Shoyou moves across the court, three quick strides; thinks of mango, the taste of orange and tangerine in the bright yellow sweetness— mangoes taste like oranges, and therefore oranges taste like mangoes; and therefore Shoyou may as well be sitting on the same shoreline as Tobio, twenty thousand kilometers away, the other half of the world. Peeling away at an orange, dividing the mango night sky and the whole world beneath it between the two of them, section by section, cube by cube; one bite for every mile between them— tasting the same thing in the same moment. 

Tobio, on the other side of the world— what keeps him anchored, two feet on the ground and another two off the linoleum, a kiss to the arching rafters of the Olympic Stadium? It’s not gravity— a fickle, two-faced thing, drags at Shoyou’s feet no matter how hard he tries to fly, whatever skyscraper he jumps off— for gravity flings them together, Shoyou and Tobio, Tobio and Shoyou, pulls them into coincidence, heavy-coiled red rope; through the granite and the magma and pit, through the leeching sweetness, falling upside down and downside up, straight down through the centre of the earth and the galaxy. And so Shoyou raises them up again, the sun and magma and the blood of the earth in neat cubes along the clever lines of a knife, exposed belly arched towards the sky; and the ball lifts, a perfect arcing receive against the bone of Shoyou’s thumb and the dig of his heels— falls again, upside down then downside up, hits the sand with a ringing resound only in Shoyou’s head. 

“ _Good game,_ ” Shoyou says, shakes hands with an unfamiliar face, his tongue twisting into unfamiliar shapes. Tobio eludes him, steals away with half of the northern sky. 

“ _We’ll miss ya, Shoyou,_ ” the not-Tobio says, the apples of his cheek sweet. His teeth are blinding white even in the dark. “ _Come back and play with us again when ya beat them all, eh?_ ” 

Shoyou shuffles, feels the sand cling to his toes then let go. The Brazilian sky laughs at him, mocks the orange boy in a bed of mango— of tangerine, of apple, pineapple. “ _Of course_ ,” he says, grinning, opens wide and bites down with petty vindication, the sky of yellow and orange and green. 

🍊

He bites down on his first slice of orange, then the second slice, then the third; makes quick work of them— rounded tip of faded yellow, tasteless, waxy, the line of its belly marked with white zest; the armour of an armadillo on the blunt of a battering ram. First; the bitterness of the zest; first, the neat, vegetable-like sweetness; first, the bursting of the orange bits, filaments unwinding, an untangling of sunshine through blackout curtains. The sweet-and-sour bite of the orange; one on the roof of his mouth, the other the back of his tongue— then the burst of water-sweetness, fills his mouth and the uneven crowns of his teeth—then, when he swallows, the residue of sticky sweet, the final unburst pip hidden behind a molar, clinging in the gaps between his fingers. The orange tastes like a mango; apple, pineapple, every other fruit in the world; the same inexplicable sweetness hidden within the water-filled cortex, coming apart in his mouth like the fillet of a fish— and therefore it taste like everything, for first thing we ever tasted was an apple— and therefore the universe too, when Shoyou bites into it, twelve unequivocal slices. When he splits the universe into half, six perfect slices, crams it all into his mouth and bites down, it tastes of orange. 

He gathers the peel of the orange, a forlorn withered flower, inhales its mixed scent, the stickiness of its juice. The itch sinks deeper into his skin, into the marrow of his bone, scrapes open the inside of his chest. The palm of his hand burns, fresh and sweet. “That was good,” he says to Tobio, to the black of his hair and his injured-bird eyes. “Nothing beats an orange after practice.” 

“No. The orange—” Tobio says, the rough of his voice inexplicably reminding Shoyou of a mourning dove— the tremor, the tragedy. “It’s very sweet.”

**Author's Note:**

> hey I’m new :) find me @tendousatoshi on twit and @plasserby on ig  
> > I ate an orange at 4am to bring you 810 words of Accurate Orange Eating (a quarter of the word count)  
> > the word orange appears 41 times. I am sorry.  
> > I started this ten minutes before 402 dropped this is a 3k ode to my complete and abject adoration of hinata shoyou  
> > my frd actively and actually booed the appearance of other fruit until I told them it was all a metaphor for the orange  
> > my favorite fruit is cherry  
> > the universe is an orange.  
> > if u comment or hmu I’ll be so happy I cry


End file.
